Kosovo And Milosevic Essay example -- essays research papers

“I wouldn’t mind if they needed to take [Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic] out,'; said Chris Walter, 23, a college student living in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. I felt the same way about Saddam Hussein. I think the longer you keep the problem around, the sooner it is going to come back and bite you.'; From the Washington Post April 18th, 1999 The horrors of the atrocities committed against Kosovo such as the targeted attacks on civilians, “ethnic cleansing';, and most certainly mass murder have a greater impact globally than what may appear on the surface. On a humanitarian level, all these situations are marked by the same killing mixture of hope and despair – frightened women, terrified children, despondent old men and women, and helpless adults looking towards the corner of the street and gazing at the sky hoping for a miracle that does not happen – until they are driven out of their homes at gunpoint, and their houses looted and put to torch in front of their eyes – and they still thank God for sparing the lives of those who survived to face the next ordeal. This story is being repeated in the Balkans for the umpteenth time. Almost a month after the most powerful military grouping in history launched air attacks on rump Yugoslavia to compel adherence to a peace accord, a human tragedy of grotesque proportions continues to unfold in Kosovo. Nearly 50 per cent of its Albanian population has been forced to flee the country under the relentless assault of the Yugoslav army and police, amid unbelievably cruel carnage of human lives and burning of villages and towns. Kenneth Waltz’s first-image theory rests on the assumption that the causes of war are to be found in the nature and behavior of man and on the role of specific individuals, as in this case Slobodan Milosevic. If you ask the question "Why is a war taking place in Kosovo?" a large part of the reply must be "Because of Slobodan Milosevic." In an interview with Newsweek’s Lally Weymouth, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer bluntly linked Milosevic with the two names whose shadows still linger over modern Europe. Milosevic, said Fischer, "was ready to act like Stalin and Hitler—to fight a war against the existence of a whole people." It is Milosevic who has lit the flame of evil;... ...le of double standards, and credit must be given to President Clinton for using US power and influence to hammer out the Dayton Accords that brought the nightmare in Bosnia-Herzegovina to an end in 1996. But what can be said about the current situation? NATO’s Secretary general Javier Solana wants to see Milosevic indicted: “We think that at a political level President Milosevic clearly bears responsibility for what’s going on in Kosovo,'; State Department spokesman James Rubin said in Washington last week. Yugoslavia was once a vibrant, multicultural society with one of the highest living standards and the greatest degrees of openness in the Soviet bloc, a country of extraordinary natural and historical beauty. Today it is a bombed out, fanatic-ridden shell. The real problem that should receive urgent attention is that massive human rights violations be stopped and the refugees extended every assistance to enable them to return to their homes, most of which will have to be rebuilt. Apart from a political solution that respects the rights of the Kosovars, those guilty of massacres and ethnic cleansing must be brought to book through war crimes trials.